To commemorate Deep Throat's unveiling, I'd like to share the lyrics to a song about Richard Nixon:

Richard Nixon

God, in his infinite wisdom
Put Richard Nixon on this earth
To bring to us his heritage
One of priceless worth

A courageous leader
And a blessed man
Surely in God's plan

His heritage is from Heaven
And the magic from above
The rapture of music and melody
Of culture and of love

Yes, God, in his infinite wisdom
Put Richard Nixon on this earth
To bring to us his heritage
One of priceless worth

A leader with endless courage
A miracle you might say
And all who have met Nixon love him so
The genius of his way

God, in his infinite wisdom
Put Richard Nixon on this earth
To bring to us his heritage
One of priceless worth

This is from the "Makers of Smooth Music" compilation, a CD of songs recorded in the 60's and 70's by companies who, for a fee, put your lyrics (no matter how awful) to music, with a live band !

[A partial repost from Last April 14th]

Pharyngula gets good and bad with a stone-cold discussion of red-hot spider sex.

The registration scheme for one of the products my company^* sells uses a license file - made uniquely for each customer. The license creator, a little Windows program, takes the user's name, email address, etc., puts that through a rather complicated cryptographic process and spits out a license file.

The credit card processing company we use has a copy of our license creator. When they get an order on-line, they send the user info to our license creator which creates the license file; then they attach the license to an email message and send it to the customer. It's seamless.

Well, it was until today. Today, after years of relatively trouble-free operation, the credit card processor told us they can't handle the license creation any longer (no explanation), and that we'll have to find another way. Umm... ?

So how to fix this?

The place we use to host our web site run on some flavor of Linux / Unix, so we can't put our license generator on those servers (because it's a Windows app). They also don't let you compile executables on their machines, so we can't build a Linux/Unix version of our license creator. They let you write your own apps in scripting languages (PHP, Perl, etc), but there's no way to handle the cryptographic tasks in any of those languages (at least not with the packages our hosting service provides), so we can't write a PHP version of our license creator.

We could change hosts, and move our site to a place that does .Net hosting so we could write a .Net version of our license creator (assuming we can find a way to do the crypto stuff in .Net), but changing hosts is always a gigantic nightmare. That's really not an option.

We could change the application license scheme into something we could handle in a scripting language like PHP or Perl. But generating 10,000 new licenses for existing users is less appealing than changing hosts, and we just changed license schemes a few months ago.

So, we're stuck.

It looks like we're going to have to generate these licenses manually. This will cause much anger among customers, who, for some reason, seem to expect that everything on the internet is instantaneous. We've had to handle licenses manually in the past, when servers are down, or for special cases, and some people absolutely freak the fuck out when they don't get an immediate response. Having to wait until one of us gets around to checking our email means someone might have to wait 12 hours or more (depending on how late I sleep).

But, I see no choice, so let the bitching begin.

* - of which I am an employee, and do not speak on behalf of.

Now here's a list...

Wingnuts Online proudly presents The Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries!

They've got books about commies, by commies and for commies. Books for Nazis and books for Feminazis. Books for environmentalists, economists, psychologists, and of course, books for biologists. Need to know who ruined everything? Here's your list. (Don't) buy them all, today!

The best part of it, for me, is the little ad down the right side advertising books by "kill liberals with baseball bats and truck bombs" Coulter, "liberals are yucky" Hannity, and a whole slew of Clinton conspiracy books. Three for a dollar!

Via News-Leader.com:

Baby boys are far more likely to have smaller, less developed genitals if their mothers had high levels of chemicals commonly found in cosmetics, detergents, medicines and plastics, a study released today said.

The higher the levels of the chemical compound phthalates in the mothers during the final months of pregnancy, the less masculine their boys were when examined by pediatricians, said the study's lead author, Shanna Swan, a professor of reproductive epidemiology at the University of Rochester.

Just saying "phthalates" gives even the manliest man a Cindy Brady lisp - or maybe the Daffy Duck version, if he's mad. Dangerous pstuff indeed.

Phthalates thrunk your peniths?

Using her hi-tech time-warping device, CarrieBot 2.005 wins American Idol, three days early.

A brief article in the British newspaper, The Independent, published May 22nd, says Carrie Underwood won American Idol. The final, of course, was held on the 24th and the results weren't announced until the 25th.

We went out to a club called the 6 String Cafe last night, to see a bluegrass band called Kicking Grass, with a recently-engaged couple who have hired the band to play at their wedding (just 359 days left!). The band was good - promises to be a fun wedding.

Near the end of their first set, I went to the bathroom. I walk in and there's a man standing in the stall, noisily pissing in the toilet while talking on his cell phone. He says loudly, unconcerned with me, "It seems like you're disregarding me, my feelings, what I'm thinking. You just disregard me." Then he pauses while the other person responds (I assume), still pissing. He stops pissing, flushes, then says "I know you have other things going on, but you disregard me, my feelings, and what I'm thinking." Then he zips and continues his conversation.

A quick search for "programmer" jobs in my area turns up 77 jobs. Of those, 14 are generic recruitement pitches for the US Navy. They aren't advertising for any particular job, just trolling for anyone interested in "Computer Opportunities", "Electronic Opportunities", "Information Technology Opportunities", etc.. I realize they gotta get people, too. But come on... The best part: the location for all of them is Worldwide. Position will require relocating. No mention of the possibility for violent death.

I hate meetings. I hate them the same way I hate waking up early on a Saturday morning. It's a hassle, an insult, an interruption, and there are a thousand different reasons it's the wrong thing to do; but there's always one reason why I have to do it - and I usually end up hating that reason. That's how I feel about meetings. No matter what the goal is, being stuck in a little room with the same five people as usual, listening to the same person as usual drone on and on and on about the same nonsense as usual makes me want to fucking scream.

So, to keep from exploding in a ridiculous ball of misplaced rage, I now spend my meeting time quietly trying to better myself. The last few days, I've been trying to re-learn how to write in cursive. It's probably been 25 years since I was last required to write in cursive, and, while never good, my handwriting today is horrible. I couldn't remember how to make upper-case Fs, Qs or Zs; I tried writing my wife's name, but couldn't figure out how to handle the transition from a "w" to an "n" without drawing each stroke slowly and deliberately, like a 4th grader. Last meeting, I filled up four sheets of notebook paper with "The quick brown fox...", song lyrics and random alliterative sentences. It's horrible. I need remedial handwriting classes.